> On Intel, and now on AMD, it seems that CPPC is far worse than powerd (*).

That must depend on workloads and objectives then, since I've had the opposite 
experience on laptops in terms of latency.

> (...) And high settings use more power.

But providing better performance, or not?

> So the ability to let software control frequency is something that I don't 
> want to loose.

I certainly don't have plans to remove that.  When talking about recommending 
CPPC, I was thinking about the default value we wanted to have for the new 
'machdep.hwpstate_amd_cppc_enable' tunable, but not about removing it.  IMO, 
this tunable is here to stay (it might just change form at some point).

I also encourage you to give a shot at the patch in PR 292615, in order to see 
how the new knobs (min & max performance, desired performance) can affect your 
observations, even if after what you reported that may look unlikely.

For the future, we should probably eye at teaching powerd(8) about working with 
CPPC, so that instead of trying to set frequencies directly (which cannot 
really work with and basically defeats the point of CPPC) it would instead tune 
the desired performance value (and possibly the min and max ones as well).  
Perhaps with that combination we could get the best of both worlds (software + 
hardware tuning), at least for some workloads.

-- 
Olivier Certner

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.

Reply via email to